Six Apart, WordPress and Movable Type

Six Apart (news, site) expects continued friendship with WordPress and exploration of its new open source plugin for WordPress users. This plugin allows access to free services including sign-in using outside identities such as Google or OpenID accounts, anti-spam measures, ad networks and blog listings.

Byrne Reese also points out that Movable Type (news, site) is in the process of porting its proprietary JavaScript to jQuery. He plans to blog on this issue soon. His blog is here.

Umbraco CMS

Umbraco (news, site) holds its annual developer conference, Umbraco CodeGarden, on June 22 - 23 in Copenhagen, Denmark. This year, it looks like they'll be sold out with 150 attendees. So if you're thinking of going, register now.

As Niels Hartvig says, "We also got some other stuff up our sleeves but they're kept a secret until the conference."

Before the conference, the core team and the Umbraco MVPs will meet for four days in a country house for the Umbraco Retreat. There, they'll discuss the future of the project in both technical/architectural terms as well as items such as:

How to improve community participation

How they can open up even more

How to improve documentation and module availability

How to better evangelize Umbraco.

According to Hartvig, "It's always a blast and as good as Christmas Eve, if you're a hardcore Umbracian."

Outside of conference news, Umbraco is about to release version 4.0.2, a stability release fixing about 40 bugs with no feature additions.

Finally, Hartvig was pleased to announce that the publisher Wrox has confirmed that his and Umbraco MVP Paul Sterling's book on Umbraco is officially a go, and is scheduled for an April 2010 release.